Stateless citizenship: ‘radical democracy as consciousness-raising’ in the Rojava revolution

ABSTRACT

This article discusses radical democratic citizenship in the context of the ‘Rojava Revolution’, an ongoing society-building effort that emerged in majority Kurdish regions in the context of the Syrian war. It describes aspects of the political vision of Abdullah Öcalan, as interpreted and applied by activists involved in the democratic self-governance system in Rojava (northern Syria), since 2012. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in the region, the article focuses on the ways in which activists frame their revolution and notions of radical democratic citizenship as consciousness-raising efforts against the state system. Centering the role of educational institutions, it argues that theoretical discussions within the Kurdish freedom movement seek to emancipate political action from state-centric ways of articulating political will, justice demands, and wider geopolitical interests. Lastly, it encourages studying radical democracy efforts by taking seriously the political vocabularies, everyday practices, and long-term perspectives advanced in collective self-organisation from below.

KEYWORDS:

• Radical democracy
• revolutionary politics
• Kurdistan
• democratic confederalism
• Rojava
• statelessness

Marked by the emergence of new transnational social movements and episodes of migration and forced displacement, the 2010s have produced many occasions to critically investigate issues around citizenship, migration, colonialism, democracy, geopolitics, race, and the nation-state system as well as the ways in which these intersect (Walia 2021; De Noronha 2019; Choudhury 2017; Gaitán-Barrera and Azeez 2018). Increasingly, literature is shifting attention to the rearticulation of belonging, identity, and citizenship by and within groups at the margins of the nation-state system, such as refugees, women, racialised communities, the poor, indigenous and stateless people, thereby questioning liberal democratic assumptions behind frameworks of legal and political theory. This has presented occasions to rethink disciplines and methods in the field of migration from feminist, anticolonial and indigenous perspectives (Espiritu and Duong 2018; Garelli and Tazzioli 2013; Enomoto and MacKenzie 2018; Tofighian 2020). Taking a contentious politics approach, some scholars argue that refugee and migrant protests, as well as the solidarity with them, present ways in which different constituencies enact citizenship by giving new political meanings to it (Ataç, Rygiel, and Stierl 2016). The efforts to rethink citizenship and other forms of political belonging in light of emerging global conditions and transnational social justice movements open new avenues to theorise democracy from below, beyond or even against the nation-state, in ways that markedly differ from Hannah Arendt’s formative work on democracy, state, and citizenship.

In this article, I discuss aspects of radical democratic citizenship in the context of the ‘Rojava Revolution’, an ongoing society-building effort that emerged in majority Kurdish regions in the context of the Syrian war, which erupted in the wider context of the Arab Spring in 2011. Based on the political vision of the imprisoned leader of the Kurdistan Worker’s Party (PKK), Abdullah Öcalan, a democratic self-governance system has been implemented in Rojava Kurdistan (western Kurdistan/northern Syria), since 2012. Academic work has been produced about the political, social, and economic structures of the radical democratic aspects of this effort, which are implemented through popular academies, assemblies, cooperatives and communes (see Üstündağ 2016; Knapp, Flach, and Ayboğa 2016; Knapp and Jongerden, 2016; Dirik 2018). I present findings from my ethnographic fieldwork focusing on the ways in which activists on the ground frame their revolution also as a consciousness-raising effort against the state system, something that they often describe as a key component of the struggle to build radical democracy and meaningful political participation of groups of people historically excluded from the means of decision-making.

The diverse forms of meaning-making in the context of the Rojava revolution, expressed in political statements, art and culture projects, formal documents, media, and civic action are often overlooked in studies that ‘assess’ the ambitions to practice radical democracy in Rojava. Existing scholarship is rarely based on fieldwork or largely focuses on political parties, governance structures and international relations. By contrast, examining activists’ own framing of their political work, I argue, offers insights into the ways in which citizenship is conceptualised by the wider Kurdish freedom movement, namely as something to be holistically practiced across all spheres of life and in a manner not confined to statist institutions, but also expressed in the long-term process of building a more just society with transformed social relations. For the purposes of this article, I define the ‘Kurdish freedom movement’ as the wider social movement organising in different parts of Kurdistan and in the diaspora around the political vision of imprisoned leader Abdullah Öcalan and the ‘democratic, ecological and women’s liberationist paradigm’, which he formulated most systematically in his five volume ‘Manifesto for a Democratic Civilization’ (Öcalan 2015, 2017, 2020), his court defence statements, written from Imrali Prison island, where he has been kept since his NATO-led abduction in 1999. To discuss the invocation of revolutionary notions of citizenship within the context of the Rojava revolution, my analysis here decentres formal procedures and privileges a qualitative consideration of the sites that reproduce active citizenship: the grassroots institutions formed in the process of building ‘democratic autonomy’. For the purposes of this article, I mainly draw on the role of education, particularly popular academies, built in Rojava since 2012 and the role they play for the advancement of democratic cultures.

I begin by briefly discussing terms and concepts used by the Kurdish freedom movement as they relate to ideas around radical democratic citizenship. Here, I introduce the relationship between democracy, citizenship, identity, consciousness and politics as employed in the movement’s own literature. Although I make references to the Kurdish freedom movement’s theory and practice throughout the article, it is important to clarify from the beginning that the ‘democratic nation solution’ formulated by Öcalan especially in the final volume of his manifesto, and explained further below, is not limited to the Kurdish people, but is offered as a universal proposal for the solution of several interlocking problems in the Middle East region and beyond, such as nationalism, sectarianism, authoritarianism, and political violence, and their relationship to capitalism, patriarchy and the nation-state. In the second section, I contextualise the use of these terms in relation to the wider political society-building practice in Rojava.

A thorough discussion of Rojava’s constantly shifting political landscape is beyond the scope of this contribution. I focus instead on one frequently overlooked aspect in the movement’s political vision: the importance of what the movement refers to as ‘mentality revolution’, i.e. the multi-layered struggle to overcome hierarchy, power and domination-based attitudes that reproduce and legitimise oppressive systems of social organisation. This section draws on fieldwork material from my ethnographic research in Rojava in the summer of 2015, conducted as part of my doctoral research project on the wider Kurdish women’s liberation struggle. During my stay, I interviewed a variety of actors, including politicians, commune and assembly members, educators and coordinators at academies, journalists, and artists, in addition to observing and participating in different ‘revolutionary’ works like popular education sessions, protests, and community gatherings. I used snowball sampling and drew on my personal political connections to the women’s movement to find interviewees.

The material I offer here does not aim to demonstrate a majority sentiment; instead, the selection aims to present a sample of some of the common ways in which activists who are actively engaged in the revolution frame their struggles in relation to radical democracy, political belonging and consciousness-raising. Their sentiments and thoughts are further reflected in hundreds of widely circulated official documents, press statements, protest speeches, and TV programmes made in the context of institutions built over time as part of the revolution. Acknowledging that the perspectives of some activists cannot represent the plurality of experiences in the region, the purpose of sharing vignettes from my ethnographic fieldwork in Rojava is to offer insights into the collective vocabulary employed by activists, who define politics and citizenship outside of the realm of the state system. Finally, I address some of the challenges faced by the exercise of radical democracy in Rojava in light of social and geopolitical constraints.

Overall, I argue that the discussions within the movement on redefining citizenship seek to emancipate political action from the constraints of state-centric ways of articulating political will, civic demands, and wider geopolitical interests. Rather than being limited to procedural actions and forms, the movement’s notion of citizenship in the context of its wider democratic confederal vision gains meaning to the extent to which it is accompanied by a wider transformation of social relations and has a democratising effect on its surroundings. Radical democratic citizenship therefore gets redefined alongside the evolution of the political terrain on which it operates. On the one hand, citizenship gets concretely enacted through local participatory democracy, and on the other hand, the new social contracts and political vocabularies that develop in this process of consciousness-development and organisation give weight to wider Kurdish (and non-Kurdish) demands for democracy and justice in Middle East and world politics.

Using Kurdish statelessness to rethink citizenship

The Kurdish people are often referred to as the ‘largest nation without a state’. This negative definition of a group of approximately 40 million people reflects a state-centric geopolitical order that privileges the expression of politics within clearly defined international systems. This default definition of Kurds in relation to their colonially-imposed fragmentation and subsequent collective exclusion from the most universally legitimised form of political belonging or self-determination – the possession of an independent nation-state – impacts knowledge production on democracy in the context of Kurdistan. As argued by Rosa Burç, the methodological nationalism that permeates much of the literature on the Kurds ‘led to a situation where politics from below put forward by communities within the wider predominantly Kurdish geography have been vastly disregarded or marginalized when studying popular politics in the Middle East’ (Burç 2020, 321). The Kurds’ negative relationship to the state system is marked by their oppression and marginalisation within four different colonial contexts and to their lack of collective status in an international system politically and economically organised on the basis of nation-states. In the absence of recognition and protection due to this lack of political status and due to anti-Kurdish state policies and transnational criminalisation, devices like protest, petitions, hunger strikes, occupations, riots, boycotts, self-defence, and international solidarity campaigns have historically constituted alternative ways of expressing the political will of Kurdish constituencies. These realities constituted occasions for the Kurdish freedom movement to radically rethink politics as an anti-state decolonisation project, from Kurdistan, to the region, to the world.

In this section, I briefly outline the ways in which the Kurdish freedom movement is conceptualising citizenship both within and beyond the colonially-imposed nation-state borders that cut through Kurdistan. Radical democracy is one of three key components of Öcalan’s ‘freedom paradigm’. The other two – ecology and women’s liberation – are equally seen as both aims in themselves, but also as methods to ‘build’ democratic modernity. Two further concepts – autonomy and confederalism – are intrinsically linked to the movement’s notion of citizenship within its radical democratic framework. As we shall see, reclaiming citizenship from the control of the state plays a dual role: on one hand, it is part of the process of learning democracy in direct, participatory action, on the other hand, it pushes the state towards recognising the Kurdish question as key to its own democratisation.

The solution that Öcalan’s movement proposes against life under the state is ‘Democratic Confederalism’ as a revolutionary social, economic and political effort to build alternative institutions for peoples’ self-determination (see Jongerden and Akkaya 2013). Democratic Confederalism was introduced by Öcalan in 2005; however, his organisation’s abandonment of the nation-state ideal dates back to the mid-1990s. The origins of the ‘radical democratic, ecological, and women’s liberationist paradigm’ outlined by Öcalan are rooted in the movement’s critiques of state socialism articulated in the 1990s, a time in which women in the guerrilla groups, encouraged and supported by Öcalan, also began to develop autonomous analyses of the relationship between patriarchy and other forms of violence and domination. At the 5^th PKK congress in 1995, the aim to create a Kurdish state was formally dropped from the party’s programme in favour of seeking new perspectives to democratise socialism by emancipating it from the state. In this period, the women were already beginning to organise themselves autonomously in the military sphere, and later also ideologically, politically, and socially. The years between 2002 and 2005 were marked by major splits in the movement in the context of US interventions in the region and the rise of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) in Turkey. The geopolitical reshuffling initiated in the region led to regional and global powers’ rethinking of their relationship to the transnational character of the Kurdish question. These factors played a role in the movement’s assessment of the possibilities and impasses of Kurdish freedom struggles in light of new ideological, economic and political trends in the region and beyond. In the context of Turkey, Öcalan’s revolutionary proposals have been initiated despite war and crackdowns since the mid-2000s and continue to be implemented alongside several interlocking projects relating to democracy and peace, including the transformation of the oppressive state into a democratic republic (Gunes 2020; Burç 2019). However, it is within the context of the Rojava revolution that these proposals came to be practiced more freely and on a large scale.

In Öcalan’s prison writings, the ‘state’ is not merely understood as the actual nation-states that colonise Kurdistan, but a historical system of domination, power, enslavement, violence, subjugation and exploitation that eradicates life forms of the oppressed (Öcalan 2015, 2010).¹ This analysis, referencing the Sumerian state in Mesopotamia as a major rupture in humanity’s history, has over the last decades articulated a rich political theory and autonomy praxis against the state, which it understands as being fundamentally linked to patriarchy (ibid.). All forms of violence and exploitation are analysed as relying on the subjugation of women as the oldest class, oldest nation, and oldest colony. ‘Capitalist Modernity’ is described by Öcalan as the product of a 5,000-year-old ‘statist civilization’, which continues its existence today through the nation-state, positivist science, industrialism, financial monopolism, ecocide and feminicide. The nation-state is particularly critiqued in Öcalan as a hegemonic project to colonise, monopolise, control, discipline, measure and order by employing systematic attacks on ecologies of communities, peoples, nature and women.

Claiming that a radical rejection of such modernity is required to begin to understand liberationist, non-statist freedom histories, practices and mentalities in the region, Öcalan (2010a) proposes what he calls an anti-Orientalist, anti-modernist history of the Middle East. Committed to decolonising epistemology from positivism, Eurocentrism and patriarchal and state-centric views, he constructs a history of ‘democratic civilization’ as having existed parallel to and despite the dominant ‘statist civilization’, within resistance cultures and practices of the oppressed and excluded. Öcalan (2010a) argues that in the Middle East, as the birthplace of power and hierarchy, systems of domination were always challenged by a parallel resilient democratic culture underground, a liberationist social fabric manifested in regional mentalities, tales, epics, and practices.

To decolonise, then, Middle East culture needs to undergo a revolution of mentality and life-style against capitalist modernity’s ideological hegemony as well as reactionary forms of resistance. Öcalan’s proposed alternative is to build ‘democratic modernity’ to enable a life in which all social groups, communities, and identities, based on their self-defence and self-realisation, can organise themselves in a democratic, socialist and ecological manner and contribute to a wider egalitarian transformation of social relations: ‘The democratic modernity alternative encompasses the society of anti-monopolist, anti-capitalist democratic communities, the economic society, the democratic socialist society’ (my translation, Öcalan 2013, 203). The practical application of this philosophy on society is envisioned as a democratic autonomous and confederal system within and beyond Kurdistan to disrupt state intervention, borders, and transnational systems of oppression. In his work on libertarian municipalism, Murray Bookchin, one of the thinkers that influenced Öcalan, argues that direct political participation requires adequate forms of organisation that can foster egalitarian relations within and among individuals, societies, and nature (see for example Bookchin, 2015). Instead of formless spontaneity, Bookchin envisioned an organised and transparent form of citizenship that can render state authority obsolete by undoing hierarchy and domination through radical democratic forms of organising that generate and grow through creativity, individuality and social justice. As such, an active citizen is the one who organises and participates in politics on autonomous terms, neither tied to the electoral cycles determined by states and elites, nor detached from society and free-floating without purpose or political strategy.

All of these ideas around grassroots anti-state political self-organisation are embedded in the ‘democratic nation’ solution, outlined more adequately in Öcalan’s last two manifesto volumes (Öcalan 2013, 2010a). This is a vision for a locally-rooted, yet internationalist political belonging that is against the nation-state system, which perpetuates nationalism, chauvinism, and sectarianism in the region. Even as it actively seeks to protect and defend cultures, languages, and identities from assimilation and genocide, the democratic nation solution is simultaneously an attempt to dissociate the idea of the nation from ethnic or culturalist ideas in favour of a more dynamic, constantly rearticulated idea of nationhood based on shared democratic cultures (Dirik 2018). As a political term, the ‘democratic nation’ has been employed in various sites of the Kurdish freedom struggle (such as in the party programs of the Peoples’ Democratic Party HDP in Turkey), but it found its most concrete expressions within the Rojava revolution. In any case, the march towards the democratic nation solution is understood by activists as involving the promotion of a ‘different mentality’ to that of the nation-state.

One of the main pillars for building democratic nations is the establishment of autonomous academies for political literacy. The next section will discuss the role of education in the making of the movement’s wider freedom imaginary. The Kurdish freedom movement’s critiques of positivism and modernity in relation to the state, patriarchy, and capitalism constitute an important dimension of notions of political consciousness and participation in Rojava. Yet, literature on the education system in Rojava is extremely limited (Knapp, Flach, and Ayboğa 2016; Dirik 2018a; Dinç 2020). Instead of assessing the content or format of activities relating to education in Rojava, the following section aims to communicate the ways in which activists, among them people who built up the education system there, understand their activities philosophically and politically in relation to the ‘mentality revolution’ they view as an indispensable part of their revolutionary project.

‘Learning’ radical democracy in Rojava

When protests began in Syria in March 2011 in the context of wider mobilisation in the region, the regime of Bashar al-Assad issued citizenship to previously disenfranchised Kurds in what appeared to have been an attempt to curb Kurdish participation in anti-regime protests. The Syrian state’s weaponisation of citizenship to discipline the Kurds dates back to the early 1960s, when a population census was ordered in the north-eastern Cizîre (Jazeera) province, bordering the Kurdish regions of Iraq and Turkey, by presidential decree, after which the citizenship of at least 120,000 Kurds, who could not provide evidence of Syrian residency before 1945, was revoked. Further status distinctions were made between makhtumin (unregistered) or ajanib (foreigner) (Tejel 2009). Citizenship statuses were inherited by children via their fathers, but not all marriages were recognised (Schmidinger 2018). This effort was coordinated by an extensive intelligence apparatus, which deeply penetrated and controlled all of Syrian society, establishing an atmosphere of state violence, suspicion, and mistrust (Knapp, Flach, and Ayboğa 2016). Under the Arab nationalist state, Kurds were disproportionately deprived of access to economic opportunities, higher education, and social mobility. The land reforms removed them from their means of subsistence and left the Kurdish regions disproportionately underdeveloped, leading to labour migration and poverty. The PKK and its leader first arrived in Syria in 1979 and began the work of building what would soon become a mass anti-colonial guerrilla movement. The underground social and political movement that developed in the context of several decades was the main driver of the events that unfolded in Rojava from 2011 onward.

Kurdish activists, who had been supportive of the PKK for decades and were therefore committed to Öcalan’s paradigm in their efforts to create an autonomous Rojava within a democratic, free Syria, often describe the nation-state as the main culprit responsible for inciting war and conflict in the region. As many of my interlocutors in different spheres of revolutionary work in Rojava, from fighters to neighbourhood organisers, pointed out, behind a backdrop marked by authoritarianism, colonialism, nationalism, and state violence, liberation could not come about through the mere establishment of functional state mechanisms to replace the regime. Rather, a profound democratic culture within society and solidarity-based, egalitarian relationships across communities was needed to put an end to domination. This in turn required what many described as a decolonisation of the mind from the state’s chauvinistic ideology. Adnan Hisên, a teacher at the Mesopotamia Academy for Social Sciences, which was founded as an alternative revolutionary higher education institution in 2014 in the northern city of Qamishlo, told me during our interview at the academy in the summer of 2015:

‘It is wrong to understand the Ba’ath Party² merely as a political power; its administrative and social politics epitomize Middle Eastern capitalist modernity and its most successful attempt to annihilate sociality, societal ethics and solidarity culture (…). To understand the revolutionary struggle we try to lead, it is important to be aware of the mentality that the Ba’ath system created here and how it is linked the nation-state’s understanding of science and knowledge.’

His statements reflect the language that has been used in the self-governance system in Rojava, first formally announced in January 2014 and subsequently expanded to form the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AANES) at the time of writing. Hadiyê Yusif, former female co-president of the Democratic Federation of Northern Syria, one of the models that preceded the AANES, was part of the efforts to declare the revolution of Rojava and emphasised that their political work is committed to the creation of a democratic nation, based on the age-old culture of coexistence in the region prior to the nation-state:

‘Through the nation-state, we are still living the Sumerian system of class domination, where man rules over woman, nation over nation. This concept of domination is crucial for the establishment of empires. And with capitalist modernity, the values and cultures of communities have been looted to the benefit of individualism, immorality, sexism, and ignorance. Individuals and collectives who resisted to defend their existence, experienced genocides and were forced to find refuge in the mountains. This was exacerbated by the nation-state which colonized Middle Eastern society by privileging a small section of each country in the name of the nation. Many struggles and leaders rose against injustice throughout history, but actions were based on missing analyses or faulty assumptions. One example is real socialism with its statist concept of revolutionary administration. Likewise, the freedom cries across the Middle East and North Africa in the last years did not necessarily result in cultural, intellectual or social transformations. Changing of leaders or governments is not equivalent to freedom. There is a set of ideological problems that must be dealt with before you can think of an alternative system (…) Our struggle here is to facilitate the free togetherness of all peoples. A democratic nation against the nation-state.’

Similar claims were made by others, who stressed that democratic change cannot come about with new regimes and laws but rather with mentalities that are committed to the creation of society. Activists described their mission not only in the context of geopolitical developments but referenced, drawing on Öcalan’s thought, millennia-old systems of oppression that they wanted to overcome with social revolution.

Beyond discourse, a key part of the promotion of new political cultures is the ‘peoples’ diplomacy’ work on the ground, led by commune members, assembly committees and faith groups. The ideological perspectives relating to this area of work, too, are outlined in Öcalan’s writings: he advocates for a non-statist form of diplomacy, wherein neighbourly relationships between the communities are encouraged and fostered, or repaired if severed, with reference to shared regional histories. The women’s movement frequently uses the term ‘strategic alliances’ instead of ‘diplomacy’, which is perceived as a state-centric and male-dominated term. To sustainably fight hostilities, ethnic and religious conflict, and discrimination and violence within societies, inter-community work is accompanied by political education.

As previously noted, the movement views education as an important aspect in its notion of radical democracy and revolution, an indispensable sphere of work that relates to the ‘mentality revolution’ necessary to enable the building of a society based on justice, equality, and solidarity. Much of the movement’s pedagogical work, from the guerrilla mountains to community centres in the European diaspora, centres around the liberation of the individual from mentalities (see also Westrheim 2008). Education, beyond the communication of information, serves the movement as a tool to strengthen society’s ability to be a politically literate and acting agent of transformation. The PKK’s early work in Syria and Lebanon from the early 1980s onward involved educational efforts to teach local communities about Kurdish history, including Kurdistan’s colonisation. Öcalan’s teachings, often recorded, transcribed and circulated, focused not only on perspectives on the liberation struggle and political developments, but also targeted the individual’s internalised oppression under colonisation. As such, the movement’s literature has for decades promoted individual self-liberation as a key aspect of the revolutionary process. This political attitude has been reflected in the education efforts in Rojava since 2012 (Dirik 2018a). Hanîfe Husên, member of Tev-Dem, the Movement for a Democratic Society, which built up the communes, assemblies, and cooperatives since 2012, said the following about her organisation’s approach to the role of consciousness in relation to self-determination:

‘In our view, for thousands of years, sociality was seized from the community under centralism. This undermined people’s power, meaning and identity. A will-less, defenceless society, without politics emerged because of sexism, religionism and nationalism. Education, health, culture, economy, and everything else being in the hands of the rulers, society remained without arms and legs—a society without ethics. An ethical-political society develops with everyone’s right to organize themselves with their will and ability to determine frameworks. This is what the third way is: the creation of a system of education, defence, economy, health, diplomacy etc. around the principles of a radical democratic, ecological, women’s liberationist society.’

Rojava’s education system is multilingual and explicitly refers to notions like women’s liberation, democratic nation, ecology and other themes prevalent in the movement’s philosophy. One of the most significant outcomes of the works is the fact that for the first time in Syria’s history, Kurdish, Syriac, Turkman and Circassian children are offered education in their own languages. Values like inter-communal solidarity, the protection of minorities, become part of public discourse, in addition to being placed in the curriculum. Alongside a new general educational system for children and youth, a communal education system developed through hundreds of academies across the region is available to people from all walks of life. The ideological and political motivation behind these is less concerned with teaching knowledge and facts, than with creating self-thinking subjects with the ability to be actively political and to solve issues in society. According to the education workers and participants that I interviewed in different academies, revolutionary principles such as women’s liberation and solidarity of peoples cannot be expected to come naturally in a historically oppressed community, traumatised by war. Political education, in their eyes, is vital to defend the self against assimilation, alienation and consumption by capitalist modernity’s physical and ideological weapons. Many of my interlocutors pointed out that education has a humanising effect on participants, enabling them to participate in public life more autonomously and concretely. Women with little or no formal education benefit especially from the academies, as they enable them to learn, self-reflect, share experiences and come up with new concepts of knowledge based on lived experiences. Their practices, which had been dismissed by capitalist, statist and patriarchal structures, are valued and affirmed as valid forms of knowing.

In addition to seminars and fixed-term educational sessions offered by different institutions, popular academies, including autonomous women’s and youth academies, constitute permanent sites of education, research, and knowledge production. In many ways, these also present sites for unlearning the Arab nationalist curriculum of the Ba’ath Party of Syria. An example is the Ishtar Women’s Academy in Rimelan, which was formed in 2012 and is part of a complex that was previously a Ba’ath party guest house, mostly for visitors of the intelligence services. Bombshells were turned into flowerpots; the walls are decorated with photos of revolutionary women. In 2015, I joined an ongoing education program tailored to women from all around Rojava, who worked in the sphere of justice, many as communal peace-makers. Among them were young unmarried women, as well as women who had brought their children, and elderly women, whose children were working in the institutions built in the context of the revolution. Zozan, one of the coordinators of the academy, explained:

‘In this cohort alone, there are women who spent time in regime prisons and experienced torture. Previously education sessions were small and secretly held in people’s homes. For years, the regime alienated the community from its culture through violence and repression. This dissolved societal ethics, solidarity ties and any sense of belonging. This academy is an attempt to establish the foundations for people to create and live their culture and identity on their terms.’

Shahrezad, from the administration of the Women’s House in Amûdê, was a participant in the education program I attended at the academy. She made explicit remarks about the impact of education on consciousness and thus the ability to act for women’s liberation. Through raising their consciousness about structures of injustice, women realise that their oppressed status is not set in stone but can be changed:

‘Women were always blamed for their misery. Society tells women “You must have done something bad, or else you would not be suffering this”. But now we see that it is not fate. There are historic systems of oppression. This awareness is not enough, there must be an organized power that women lean onto (…). Only when we start creating a just society, we can expect meaningful ideas on liberation. That’s what we currently work on in all spheres of life. We don’t just fight against violence. Our eyes opened to all sorts of daily oppression and slavery.’

The Mesopotamia Academy mentioned above was created as a critical alternative to positivist social sciences and their perpetuation of systems of power and hierarchy. The academy engages in practices such as communal and collective living and decision-making, as well as enabling students to be teachers in the classes and to criticise the format, content, and structure of the learning activities and environments. Jineolojî, the Kurdish women’s movement’s ‘science of women and life’ is taught at the academy, as well as at the newly founded universities and in various radical education settings in the public academies. Male students of the academy who attend Jineolojî classes told me about how it made them realise the omnipresence of patriarchy and its manifestations in their own personality. They claimed that the historical analysis of different forms of oppression and power and their interrelatedness enabled a renewal of their own attitudes towards their friends and family in favour of more democratic relations. Apart from learning about history, students engage in issues like methodology and practical implementations of social science analyses to impact their communities for the better.

While the act of fostering in more people the ability to theorise on society does not itself amount to a change, it is important to note that the democratisation of the ability to make statements about society does have meaning for communities who have been alienated from their own history and lacked the ability to speak on their own behalf. Consider for instance, the words of Leyla, a young woman working in the Tirbêspiyê Mala Jin (women’s house), who grew up in a context of violence and vulnerability:

‘I had no education before the revolution. Once I received (political) education and was able to reflect on my past life, I was full of regret when I thought about my life until now. I should have struggled more to access education. But we were women, who could not struggle. We didn’t know how. With the revolution, we started getting to know ourselves. Now we organize the power to struggle.’

Outside the academies, knowledge production for radical democratic citizenship in Rojava also develops in daily practical collective activities, including agriculture, press work, political mobilisation across ethnic, linguistic and religious lines, or self-defence practices. Many of the veteran cadres whom I interacted with, some of whom had left ordinary civilian life to dedicate themselves to revolution, pointed out that their experiences of large-scale bottom-up organising in Rojava provided opportunities and occasions to unlearn otherwise habitualized ways of revolutionary organising, despite the enormous challenges of this work. This particularly came through in the work of the women’s movement. To the women’s movement Kongreya Star, as its activists told me, the measure for their success is women’s autonomous and meaningful participation in public life, as decision-makers, valued workers, educators, fighters, artists, opinion-shapers, and community activists that not only take part as individuals, but also strengthen women’s collective demands to dismantle patriarchy. One concrete site of women’s autonomous life in Rojava is Jinwar Women’s Village in Derbasiyeh, near the border to Turkey, an all-women’s village that was built as a practical project of the Jineolojî efforts in Rojava. With its own educational institutions, health system, economy, and decision-making structures, it presents an alternative life outside of patriarchy for women who prefer to live in this way, with or without children.

Another important sphere of promoting democracy-based social relations in Rojava is culture and art. Historically, the Syrian Arab nationalist regime prevented non-Arabic languages and cultures from being taught or used in public events and communications. The women’s culture movement Kevana Zerrîn organises trainings and activities such as cultural associations, art exhibitions, bands, dance and theatre groups with the aim of rendering ‘women’s colours’ more visible in the process of anti-patriarchal social transformation. Many bands, film and drama collectives in Rojava include several cultures and sing revolutionary songs in multiple languages. Newly-formed centres in the fields of theatre, cinema, music, dance, and fine arts, many of which are organised under the revolutionary culture and art association of Hunergeha Welat, recruit from and perform for local communities, displaced people and refugees and revive their traditional folkloric dances, artisanship, songs and specific forms of musical expression such as dengbêjî.³ These efforts are amplified in the media outlets built often with the help of the local self-administrations.

As a result, ‘democratisation’ gets applied to all spheres of life, from an individual’s way of thinking to the family and to the larger world-system. It is not framed as a state to be achieved when certain measures are met, but rather as a constantly evolving horizon for a different Middle East. As such, the effort of establishing a radical democratic culture is not limited to what would traditionally be referred to as ‘domestic affairs’. As a result of the non-statist conception of democracy, the self-administration structures in Rojava were able to directly intervene in regional developments. For example, when the so-called Islamic State attacked the Ezidis in Sinjar in August 2014, committing a large-scale genocide and feminicide, fighters from Rojava and PKK guerrillas jointly fought to open a ‘humanitarian corridor’ from Sinjar to Rojava, rescuing more than 10,000 genocide survivors stranded in the mountains. The refugees from Iraq, as well as IDPs from other parts of Syria were encouraged and helped in setting up their own self-administration structures in camps or within cities and thereby became part of the political fabric woven by the revolution.

Despite these efforts, there are numerous internal and external challenges to radical democracy in Rojava, from authoritarian tendencies among political groups to US-led efforts to dissociate the political process on the ground from its socialist roots. Recent developments demonstrate the precarious geopolitical political terrain upon which Rojava’s model is being built. Most importantly, two Turkish state invasions (Operation Olive Branch in 2018 and Operation Peace Spring in 2019) and the years of (at the time of writing, ongoing) occupations that have devastated the lives of hundreds of thousands of civilians, largely disrupted the society-building efforts with great human cost. It is beyond the scope of this article to assess the consequences of recent regional developments in detail. It is however important to note that while the structures and institutions built in the now occupied regions have been physically dismantled and their workers displaced, many of them were reorganised and recovered in different ways in new locations soon after the invasions. For instance, the women’s assemblies organised by Kongreya Star in Afrin re-established themselves in IDP camps, where they now focus on the new needs arising among women who are displaced. The justice-seeking demands of people from Afrin, most importantly, their insistence on return, have been actively supported by the various institutions built in the context of the revolution. Displaced people are regularly invited on to TV programs and discussion panels to voice their demands to wider audiences. In response to the many attacks on Rojava, plurinational alliances, umbrella assemblies, armed units, and cultural works have increased in numbers and continue to introduce their partially already applied model of a federal, women’s liberationist, and democratic-nation based Syria to other Syrians and to global audiences.

Conclusion

The examples mentioned in this article illustrate the ways in which the Kurdish freedom movement’s notion of democracy does not refer to a mechanical application of a set of formal measures and standards. The revolutionary activities in different spheres of life are seen as crucial sites of organising a new, liberated mentality with which authoritarianism, centralism, sectarianism, patriarchy and nationalistic chauvinism will be overcome. Democracy is thus understood as a mentality, an attitude towards the right to exist and let exist, a practice to enable what activists often call a ‘more just, right, and beautiful life’. In this sense, radical democratic citizenship is meaningful and enabled to the extent to which the ‘slow revolution’ within society advances, opening new possibilities for people to articulate political will beyond rituals like voting. Reimagining political belonging outside of the statist sphere means that radical democratic citizenship gets enacted within a process of rendering oneself ungovernable in an organised fashion. Such deliberate statelessness enables Kurdish constituencies to render themselves active and protected vis-à-vis the nation-state-centric world-system.

In this article, I drew on my ethnographic fieldwork in Rojava to provide a perspective on reading the movement’s articulation of radical democratic citizenship as a consciousness-developing process beyond the imagination and geopolitical constraints of nation-state centric frameworks of political belonging. In my analysis, I privileged a method of reading the movement’s terminology as invoked by local activists with the aim of offering a view of the ways in which actors working within the civilian sphere of the revolution make sense of their participation in political life as part of a long-term process of dismantling power. I argued that a political and historical consciousness is being advocated from different fronts in Rojava, making the population attentive to the importance of active citizenship for the conscious construction of a free life and as an act of decolonisation from the state in the here and now, within individuals and communities. Future research on Rojava and other sites on developing revolutionary perspectives on radical democracy can advance our understanding of the relationship between political belonging and participation, justice-seeking, and social transformation by going beyond discourses and taking seriously the practical use of terminologies, the everyday practices, and the long-term perspectives advanced in collective self-organisation from below.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. The referenced texts by Ocalan were first published several years earlier in Turkish. Some of the publication dates indicated here refer to the translations. See bibliography for more detail.

2. Founded in 1947, the Arab Socialist Ba’ath Party rose to power in Syria via a coup d’état in 1963 and has been ruling the country in a highly authoritarian fashion ever since.

3. Dengbêjî is a traditional form of Kurdish storytelling through singing.